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Essential has bought a defunct email app to accompany its deathbed phone

Stay of execution

IF YOU'RE LOST at sea and drowning, do you care who rescues you? In theory, no, but if you then glance up and see the word "Titanic" on the bow of the rescue vessel, you may find a couple of doubts creeping in.

In a wholly unrelated story, it appears Essential - Android creator Andy Rubin's phone company - has bought CloudMagic, the company behind email app Newton. Yes, the same Newton that was shut down in September, despite having 40,000 paying subscribers. It turns out you just can't compete with free - especially when the free is provided by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple.

It's a strange acquisition and there certainly aren't any clues in the official Essential statement on the matter, as quoted by TechCrunch, which feels like it could have been generated by a business AI trained on millions of forgettable press releases.

"We are always on the lookout for companies with great technology and talent to help accelerate our product roadmap," the company said.

If you squint a bit, you can kind of see how Newton would fit into those plans, borrowing the app's features to make AI-powered replies more functional, but it feels like a bit of a longshot to us. Bluntly, people buy phones because of things like speed, battery life, camera and style. They don't buy them because of the built-in email client. µ